


This Strange Course

by roseprinted



Category: Lovely Little Losers, Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Alcohol, Explicit Language, F/M, Gen, Implied Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-09-02 03:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20269183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseprinted/pseuds/roseprinted
Summary: It takes moments to break their world apart, and months to put it back together. This is the story of spring.





	1. this well carried

**Marry, this well carried shall on her behalf**

**Change slander to remorse; that is some good:**

**But not for that dream I on this strange course,**

**But on this travail look for greater birth.**

****

_Much Ado About Nothing___ Act IV, Scene I


	2. what men dare do

**18th August 2014**

Beatrice loses the fight to stay at home with Hero. 

She's not convinced that Leo really would call her parents, but there are other things on her mind. Hero’s barely left her bedroom since Saturday night yet Beatrice can still hear her wheezing through the wall that divides them. In years gone by that would be her cue to go and wake one of her aunts, to tell them that Hero can’t breathe again, but now the aunts are gone and it’s Beatrice who creeps into Hero’s room and curls up at the foot of the bed, watching.

_I just feel_, Hero had gasped, after a bout of this,_ like I can’t make it stop_.

_I know_, said Beatrice, reaching out to push tangled hair back from her face. _I’m sorry_.

But she isn’t sure what she’s sorry for, really, except for everything. She can’t make Hero breathe any more easily, just like she can’t go back and stop Claudio’s outburst, can’t solve his sudden transformation. It was all she could do to talk Hero down on Saturday night, to rub her back and wipe away the trails of her mascara. To ignore the whispers from the onlookers, as she babbled nonsense to Hero and waited for her gasps to soften, her heartbeat to slow. To be thankful when Leo came back and sent them away, when he cleaned up as Beatrice took Hero to bed.

_She can’t go to school tomorrow_ she’d told Leo, as they picked at their stir fry the previous evening. _Not if she’s still like this _.

Leo just nodded, pushed his bowl away._ I already told work_.

~o~

So Beatrice is alone on the walk to school. There’s just her thoughts, a merry-go-round of moments, as she trudges down the hill into the Messina valley with no idea what it holds for her.

As it turns out: not much. It's just another Monday morning, however badly her own world has been shaken, and so the bell rings and she goes to form and the bell rings again and she goes to Physics. And because it's just another Monday morning there's Benedick, waiting for her at the top of the stairs.

"Hi."

He’d messaged her yesterday,_ how's things?_, but she didn't respond.

"Hi." She still can't. His eyes are fixed on her, waiting for her to speak.

"Will you two be joining us?" Ms Brahe is stood in the classroom doorway, her eyebrows raised. Beatrice breaks his stare and hurries into the room, wondering how long this day can possibly last.

She moves through the day at a snail’s pace, her head full of Hero. For once she has no desire to talk, no idea of what she might say, and so she doesn’t. Not that she listens either, the flat drone of Mrs Stevens’ Stats lesson fading into the backdrop as Beatrice contemplates their situation.

The obvious explanation is that Claudio has gone insane. He seemed pretty unhinged that evening, stood in the kitchen flinging accusations at Hero like that. And Robbie? Robbie. Hero can’t stand Robbie. Okay, she’s nicer to him than Beatrice is, but that’s only because she’s an unnaturally nice person. She’d still been glad when he and Meg broke up, Beatrice was sure of it. Although some people could misinterpret that – but who would? Hero was the last person in the world to do that to Meg, let alone to Claudio.

Not that Meg had stuck around to hear that, on Saturday night. And nor had Claudio. Those two were straight out of the door, with Robbie and John and Pedro alongside. And Leo had left after them, which was when most of Hero’s friends decided they’d better go home too. By the end it had just been Ursula, Balthazar and Benedick, stood awkwardly on one side of the living room as Beatrice tried to coax Hero to stop crying, to breathe properly. It wasn’t how she’d imagined the evening going.

Remembering the look on Hero’s face that afternoon, the gleam in her eyes and that stupid smile – Beatrice had made fun of her for it, but that hadn’t stopped her – is more maddening than anything else. There ought to be rules. Nobody with the power to make her cousin that happy had the right to take it away like that. And now Hero’s on her own again, in her room, upset and very possibly not breathing properly.

It’s that image that prompts what Beatrice does next. As she leaves the classroom she turns to the left out of habit, and then stops.

Left takes her out onto the walkway, down into the courtyard and across the grounds to their usual table between the Art blocks. Right, though – someone behind her curses, and she steps aside – right takes her down the stairs and practically into the back field. Which she knows, from her first weeks in Auckland, is where she can find a small, rusting side gate that leads to the Messina creek. It’s the long way around and the footpath will be a swamp, but it’s there.

Decision made, Beatrice swings her rucksack onto her shoulder and turns on one heel. Right, towards the staircase. Towards home. Towards Hero.

~o~

If Beatrice hoped to have the strength of numbers on her side, it’s not something she’s holding out for by the end of school on Tuesday.

She’s running late without Hero to nag her, and the bell is already ringing as she reaches the school gates. With an extra burst of speed she dives down the side of the car park to take the shortcut to History and arrives in the nick of time, almost tripping over Ben’s stupid legs as she falls into her chair.

Tony looks over to her from a few seats away. “Everything alright?”

“Late,” she explains, letting her head fall back and gasping down air.

“That wasn’t what I meant,“ but his voice is drowned out as the last of the class trails in, taking their seats and complaining about the reading. Beatrice feels the chair beside her being moved and knows that Pedro is there.

“Hi.” His voice seems unsure. She hasn’t seen him since Saturday night, since he left Hero’s party with Claudio.

She straightens up and opens her eyes. Pedro’s looking at her warily, the same expression he gets when she’s telling him about something he doesn’t want to hear. The subtext in _ Sherlock_, usually, or Benedick’s latest display.

“Hello.”

Apparently taking her response as permission, Pedro sits down beside her and begins to unpack his bag. At the front of the room Mr Hollingshead is clapping his hands for their attention.

“Quiet down, there, quiet down. You know the drill: two points and a question from your reading, ten minutes.”

He turns back to the whiteboard as the class shuffles into their groups. 

Beatrice looks about. Unlike her, Pedro clearly had nothing else that weekend to distract him from homework, his reading neatly summarised across two pages of notes. He looks pointedly at her and Tony’s closed notebooks.

“Didn’t you do any of it?”

“No, I didn’t,” she hisses. “I was a bit busy trying to keep Hero alive, thank you very much.”

Pedro looks surprised.

“Why, what happened to her?”

“She couldn’t breathe, Pedro! Which you’d know if you’d bothered to stick around. What do you expect, with Claudio going off at her like that?”

He clicks his tongue. “Right. Well, I guess she feels bad.”

“What do you mean?” She remembers him shouting, in the middle of everything. “You don’t actually think she cheated on Claudio, do you?”

“Come on, Bea. She got caught and she’s feeling guilty about it.”

“Caught doing what?” Beatrice scrambles upright in her chair, disbelieving.

Pedro scoffs. “I know you think she’s perfect and everything, but what she did was fucked up. It’s Claudio you should feel sorry for.”

“Well, I don’t! He should know – like you should know – Hero would never do that! Not to him and not to Meg. I can’t believe you’re actually taking his side on this.”

“You’re wrong about her. I mean, you only ever saw her in the summer before this year.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tony’s just ignoring them now, leaning back to talk to the table behind.

“Just that-“ but it’s then that the long shadow of Mr Hollingshead appears, his voice icy.

“Can I assume that all this commotion is about the Cult of Reason?” 

~o~

“I’m just saying,” Pedro says suddenly, breaking the silence “that you can’t-“

“Oh, will you just fuck off.”

Beatrice gives him her best glare, the one even Leo doesn’t argue with. Mr Hollingshead finally lost his patience and evicted them both from the classroom. It’s probably the first time Pedro’s ever been in trouble. That’s why he’s looking so irritated, running his hands through his hair. Yesterday Beatrice had been annoyed at Pedro for his mistake, now she’s downright furious. She heaves her bag onto her shoulder and turns to leave.

“Where are you going? We’re supposed to stay here.”

She rolls her eyes. “Tell him I’ve gone to the library.”

Her fury takes her out of the social studies block and then she falters. It’s barely nine and she’s already missed more of the week than the school could possibly tolerate. She still has an entire weekend of homework to do, and if she turns up to Biology without a write-up having missed yesterday’s lesson then she’s probably going to get kicked out of another classroom.

The school library is square and unremarkable, but full of light from the windows panelling the room. It’s a far cry from the library at St Miranda’s, which was the oldest part of the school and widely accepted to be haunted. The librarian there, who regarded students as unwelcome intruders on her land, would have had a thousand questions for Beatrice if she had turned up there before the end of first period. At Messina, though, no eyebrows are raised.

It’s as good a place as any for her to try and collect her thoughts. Even after Pedro shouted at her, them, on Saturday night, she hadn’t really thought he would believe Claudio’s story. It was so patently ridiculous, and he’s known Hero for as long as he’s known Beatrice. Not as well, maybe, but still.

But if he’s going to stick to this, it doesn’t exactly bode well. People follow Pedro, they always have, and Claudio is popular in his own right. What if the rest of the school does decide that this whole debacle is Hero’s fault?

_ Not even going there _, she tells herself sternly, and opens her textbook.

~o~

  
The library is her refuge for that day, and the next, and the next. Usually she has a video to edit during Wednesday form time, but not this week. Rather than stewing in that room, ignored by students and teacher alike, she comes here.

Exams are still far enough away that the library is largely empty, with nobody to pester her. If she concentrates hard enough she can stave off the fears that are brewing in the back of her mind, drown them out with . Balthazar comes to sit opposite her for most of their free period but is – blissfully - silent as she transfers formulae onto notecards.

It must be Balthazar who tells Ursula where to find her, though, because she turns up at lunchtime and heads straight for Beatrice’s table.

“How’s Hero?” Ursula doesn’t bother with the preamble.

“Bad.” Beatrice can’t lie to Ursula. “She keeps having those attacks. Where she can’t breathe properly.”

“Like when we were little?”

“Yeah.”

Ursula doesn’t ask any more. She’s been around for as many of those as Beatrice, probably more. It’s a small group that remembers Hero as she was back then, when any kind of fun came with a cost. Worried looks, pleas to be careful.

“She hasn’t had to go to emergency or anything. But she has these attacks, and her blood pressure’s too high, and she’s not even _ sleeping _…” Beatrice trails off, not sure what else there is to say.

“Will you give her my love? She hasn’t… I guess her phone’s been off.”

“I know. Sorry, I should’ve – you and Meg. I kind of haven’t replied either.”

“You’re not the only one. Meg’s disappeared too.” Ursula sighs and pulls her legs up onto the chair. “Which I get. Are people in your year talking about it?”

“A bit. What about yours?”

“It’s all they’re talking about.” Ursula picks up one of Beatrice’s pens, pops the cap.

“Do they…”

“They all think Hero did it. And when I say - it’s everyone, Beatrice. Everyone.”

~o~

  
It’s as if Ursula’s words have lifted a filter that Beatrice didn’t even know she was employing. Just in the minutes it takes to walk between lessons, she can hear them. Hero’s name on the air, and Robbie’s too. The whispers that stop when she gets too close, the hurried _ shh! _between friends.

Everyone seems to be looking at her. Before this week she’d have been surprised if most of the Messina student body recognised her at all: she hasn’t spent the last six years here, just drifted in at the end. But that must have changed too, because she can see it now, from the flickers of interest to the unabashed staring.

By the time she makes it to History at the end of the day she would happily have sunk into the ground rather than walk another metre of the campus. So the last thing she needs when she walks into the classroom is Pedro’s eyes on her too, his brow furrowed. Her first inclination is to tell him to fuck off again, but Mr Hollingshead is there, looming.

“Beatrice. How nice to see you again. Now, do you think we might manage a whole lesson without interruption from your doubtlessly _ fascinating _ personal lives?”

Pedro grunts something that might have been agreement. Beatrice nods. The teacher just rolls his eyes.

The period passes in complete silence, at least between the two of them. Beatrice has her bag packed and ready to go before the bell even rings, jumping to her feet the minute they’re dismissed and making for the door.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had great plans for this fic, and that's why I was so determined to publish it on Hero's 21st birthday. But if you want to make God laugh then tell him your plans.
> 
> It will obviously, no longer be published five years on from the relevant point in the storyline, as I had first intended. But is is planned and it will be finished. I will now include a date at the beginning of each chapter to orient you in the universe, because the videos are only referenced in this story.
> 
> This will be the last rambly, personal note that you get from me until the end. In the meantime: canon will be followed, characterisation is hopefully accurate and give something to a charity, if you can. Thank you for being here.


End file.
